Cultural Landscapes: Preservation Challenges in the 21st Century

Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the World Heritage Convention and the 20th anniversary of the Declaration on Cultural Landscapes, this conference will bring together scholars and professionals from around the world to address the debates over the interrelationship between culture and nature, the challenges of preservation within historic urban landscapes, the development of an integrated approach to identifying and assessing cultural landscapes, and the challenges of developing conservation strategies that reflect the complexities of world cultures and sites and respect their multiple stakeholders.

Defined combined works of nature and humankind that express a long and intimate relationship between peoples and their natural environment, cultural landscapes embody diverse interactions between humans and their environment, seek to protect living traditional cultures, preserve the traces of cultures that have disappeared, and in the case of historic urban landscapes, maintain the historic fabric of living urban environments.

The conference will be structured around:

A series of "forward looking" thematic panels: Resilience and Stability; The Challenge of Climate Change; Continuing Use; Intangible and Tangible Values; and Historic Urban Landscapes.

Six highly focused project reviews or special topics: examinations of specific cultural landscape projects currently underway or planned worldwide, or on specific strategies for management, emphasizing practical implementation and bottom up strategies integrating communities, stakeholders, etc.

The conference is sponsored by the Program in Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies at Rutgers University with the participation of the Center for Art and Cultural Policy Studies, the Woodrow Wilson School (Princeton University), Penn Cultural Heritage Center (University of Pennsylvania), the Bloustein School of Public Policy and Planning (Rutgers University), and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences/Landscape Architecture (Rutgers University).